Mirza Ghalib and The Public Sphere

Posted on April 11, 2015 by secondsaturn

I subscribe to the Tata Sky and within the bouquet I get Javed Akhtar Active. This is really the channel I usually watch apart from the standard detective serials like CID, Monk, Castle, Mentalist and Adalat. All of these add substantially to the way my mind works. The other day, Javed Akhtar was discussing rahguzar, an Urdu word whose closest meaning in Hindi is the public space. We know of Habermas born in the year 1929 and dead only recently as the master theoretician of the public sphere. It was he who in a step by step manner through the use of historical memories of Europe arrived at the development of a public space which apart from the street squares and its cafes, its painting galleries and critique clubs also included the much circulated print media and literature. The idea of the public sphere was actually to stand between the State and the economy, economy as that being wholly located within the household of Europeans. The development of capitalism and the market then becomes the development of the public space; the exchange of goods and services being done through impersonal means of the famous “invisible hand” of Adam Smith. The crisis of the public sphere, according to Habermas, then lie in the confusion of economics with the public space and which then becomes corrupted by the interests of the capitalists.

The Urdu poets of India also imagined the public space. Since Urdu poetry has heavily influenced the Hindi films all through the decades of the 30’s to the 70’s, the idea of the public space in the popular Hindi film is developed out of the ideas of Urdu poetry and among them, the star is Mirza Ghalib. Ghalib wrote profusely in Persian and also in Urdu. Rah Guzar, a common theme among the Urdu poets is best imagined as the path which is passed and since this is a path, literally a road it is a public space. The public space of the Urdu poets is not merely a space beyond the home but it is also a moment in one’s journey, a moment, which because of the journey will necessarily pass into its next. The public space in Indian thought is therefore also one of mobility, which in the Hindi film becomes open to possibilities of upward social mobility. Protagonists are forever taking the road to find romance, love, lost parents and siblings and even large and unimagined fortunes. The Hindi film’s idea of the public sphere is typically a legacy of the Urdu poetry.

Ghalib imagines the public space as a space of liberation; it is typically without walls and enclosures and hence it is not a salon, nor a café. And because it is without enclosures it is emancipatory and liberating and liberating it is because within walls lie our social norms and rules that divides people into castes, religions, creeds, gender and age. It is the public sphere where these particularities are all mixed up and become the universal. Ghalib and the entire ilk of his followers seek this liberation of universality. Ghalib is no Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, the man who influenced modern Bengali poetry to no end, albeit through the prose of his novels. Unlike Ghalib, Bibhuti Bandopadhyay imagines the universality of the human being in his (he did not mention her) quest for transcendence and sublimity. There are then two moments, one is to move beyond the social barriers and the other is to sublimate beyond the realm of earthly affairs. Popular cinema combined both these; the Hindi cinema was more of Ghalib with a sprinkle of Bibhuti while the Bengali cinema was essentially Bibhuti with somewhat of Ghalib sprayed in. The differences between Ghalib and Bibhuti also mark the differences between much of northern India and the Bengalis.
Ghalib’s idea of the public sphere as a space for universality, where because the walls are broken and the frozen moments of the Being dissolved into the journey of the Becoming, is indeed the most emancipatory project in a caste ridden, ruled restricted society of India. The colonial rule of the British had one great contribution to the Indian life, it substantially undermined the powers of the Brahmins to call shots in burning widows and beating the Dalits. Thereafter, the “Hell” of emancipation appears to have broken lose aided fully by the creation of new forms of public space, namely the railways, “pice hotels”, hostels, “mess homes” and of course the “saudagari office spaces”. But there were two other major opportunities; one was the Freedom Movement itself and the other was cinema. Far more than the media or the novel, the printed books or calendar art, it were the Freedom Movement and the popular cinema those which gave a vent to the Indian being’s grandest dreams and which was the “dance freely with abandon on the streets”, the quotes being a sentence from a vaishnav kirtan. The street dance of the followers of Chaitanya, led through the thoroughfare of Bengal roads by Nityananda is the most cherished memory of liberation precisely because it helped pull people out of their enclosures into the universal public sphere, or the road, or the rah guzar which the Urdu poets speak of.

The cinema is full of the flavour of the road; and mostly women are placed into open spaces where they freely romance men, something which the walls of their homes would not allow. There are two ways of looking at the issue; the woman is given the right to be and occupy the open spaces and yet at the same time, she is invariably in the glare of the male consumer of cinema. By constantly bringing a woman into the open sphere, the cinema may have helped in creating a visibility and hence a right for a woman to inhabit the public spaces. But at another level, her being in it helped her being ‘seen’ and “gazed at” or “tasted” by men. Ghalib’s poetry speaks from a male point of view because he relishes the fact that in the public space he gets to see women who he may never have been able to see among his social milieu. But if it is a matter of intimacy then the public space is useless; one should go indoors and once more get into the wrangles of social rules and restrictions. The frangibility and the fragility of the public sphere lie in the desire for intimacy. This is a far cry from Habermas’s apprehensions that the pristine quality of the public sphere may be corrupted by the spilling over of capitalism. The anxieties around the public sphere in the West come to rest in capitalism, while for India it is sex. The crux of critique then which, for the modern world is all about the protection of the public as universal becomes weighed in terms of possibilities of sex in India. Sex, and not class constitutes the crux of the Indian society.

Then will our sociology be different from that of the West? Yes, beneath our theorizations of caste and class and the access to more equal opportunities and to the material resources of the society, is the Levi Straussian anxiety of women. Women are our wealth, she constitutes our opportunities and she must be protected just as a diamond, locked up indoors, guarded, as the lawyer defending the Nirbhaya’s assailants say of Nirbhaya. The politics of India at the core is around sexual access and this perhaps explains why our popular cinema which except perhaps of Amitabh Bachchan, rests solely around the question of betting and getting women. This also in all probability explains why sexual violence is so much on the rise, for sex is our politics and high costs of living, women’s liberation, the high fashion of cities and the growing inequality of both material as well as cultural wealth is creating more and more unequal access to desired women. Our politics of the growing right wing, our democracy getting more and more influenced by spheres of influence of the wealthy and celebrities and the fact of market now taking the place of the nation, intensifies our anxiety of being able to get the women we want, who are getting costlier and pricier to obtain.

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Bangladesh in ICC Quarter Final – The Idea Of A Nation

Posted on March 26, 2015 by secondsaturn

Iam a nationalist; I believe in nations and I love them too. I have never considered going abroad, working or even studying there for the fear that once I cross the political boundaries of my nation, I might lose my basic coordinates and thus become disoriented in the world and thereafter steeped in nostalgia may stop in the tracks of my spiritual, intellectual and emotional growth. NRI relatives and now friends really never inspired me except for their bags full of money, and which because provenance had kindly bestowed upon me, I was relaxed enough not to have pursued with any serious intent. Nations are sublime ideals which help you to consider yourself in larger dimensions, exist beyond your own time, find a continuity of purpose; people who do not seek larger entities for themselves cannot be nationalistic. I loved the USA, so I loved the UAE, the only two places I have ever been beyond my own country and after this I spent years reading up on their histories and cultures, cuisines and fads, religious sects and the ecclesia only to get under my skin, the feel of nations which become historical entities out of long journeys that their people have made together in time. I cannot realize myself wholly as an individual until and unless I have a nation. I am constitutionally not an NRI. Perhaps this is why I respect nationalism, take interest in national struggles even at the risk of those being, by specific arrangements of territories get treated as subnationalisms.

Sometimes I carry nationalism too far into competitive sports in which I want
India to win so badly that I lose focus from the game and forget to enjoy games
as games. This is why I stay away from the sports channels. But circumstances
made me watch for the first time ever, the ICC match between Bangladesh and
India and this is when my innate nationalism leaves me confused. During my childhood, the cricket matches were played more on the grounds to the galleries and less on television sets to couch potatoes. Our galleries were noisy but grounds, which were far away were usually silent except for the occasional appeal for “out” by the bowling teams. Sometimes, bats clicked as shots were played. But in the day and age of the television, now voices of players can easily be heard through close range microphones. Under such changed and “mediatically” evolved circumstances I was forced to partake in the India-Bangladesh match because my parents watch cricket keenly. It was then that I heard the players speak; and it was Bangla.

The Bangladesh players looked like Bengalis, they spoke in Bengalis, and their
mannerisms were stereotypically Bengali. They emanated from a culture that I was primarily socialized into, its literature which I read and they lived in lands around which my collective and historical memories have grown. And these are typically the very things that extend and enlarge me, place me into the transcendental and sublimated ideal like the nation. In sharp contrast, I never speak in Hindi, do not have any consonance with the so-called “Indian” festivals of Diwali or Ramnavami, I have no interest in their marriage rituals, or in their daily routines, I understand none of their family politics, or the meanings of their everyday lives. Suddenly I felt myself turn against in repulsion towards the so-called Indians; the bunch sitting on the spectator benches looked so crude, so uncultured, and full of the boorishness that non exposure to the refinement of the Bengali culture consists of. India was just an imagination; it was never a lived in reality in which I learnt to sublimate myself. In which language did I think of Mother India? In which language did I learn that India was the first among the nations in the world? It was not Hindi; it was Bengali. What was the Golden land that had to be freed from the British? It were the green paddy fields which lay in a limitless stretch under the vibrant blue skies which I often watched in the afternoons from the window of the mother’s village home. These were neither the Sahyadri, nor the Thar, neither the sea side nor the snow-capped hills. The lived in reality of a nation is the culture that you use to sublimate your mind. Bengal is a nation; divided or not. India is not one, united or otherwise. Not for a person like me who draw so much from her surroundings rather than be given to imaginative fantasies.

I suddenly wanted Bangladesh to win the match. I felt as if my identity, my moorings, my bearings depended on the victory; just as I felt moments ago for India. Bangladeshis played fabulously, bowled fiercely and compared to the relatively puny Indians, they looked robust and muscular. They stepped heavily, moved bodily and screamed violently; all the right kind of voice, eye and body language to make any nation proud. But then they all collapsed and lost the match rather timidly to India. The commentators, now known as the fourth umpires said that the Bangladeshi captain changed bowlers too often and experimented far too much rather than stick to the conservative strategies that was ensuring them wickets. To my mind, this was not so. The reason for Bangladesh team to lose the game were the three consecutive wickets which the umpire decisions refused to let them take. From what it appeared on television and me not really in sync with cricket these days, drawing up solely from my long term memory since my father went up to go to the washroom and my mother throwing holy water on a small make shift temple in one corner of our study board just in that short interval of bowler appeals, I was fairly convinced that Bangladesh was right and the umpires were wrong. This could have devastated any team and it did to Bangladesh as well.

But there was a caveat; the umpires’ decisions hurt the team so badly that they started destroying themselves. It was very clear that the Bangladesh game was self-destructive, suicidal and on purpose plotting defeat. This was a very strange behaviour emanating out of a set of young men purporting to represent their society and nation, thorough bred in the art of the game, excellent of technique, remarkable in physique and fitness. Is this then the character of the Bengali? Is it possible to break the Bengalis so easily? It seems that it is. Bengalis, it is said are emotional. It is easy to break Bengal by promoting bad press, spiteful media publicity. Bengal’s concentration can easily be broken. Speak of one Sarada scam, Bengalis lose faith in their leader; speak of non-industrialization political parties bend backwards to give away land to corporates like the Tatas and Jindals. Bengal has been easy to break, to colonize, to incite into violence, to crush under debts, to steal away from and to exploit. No wonder then Bengalis love dictators; Hitler is admired, his book Mein Kampf, is one of the best sellers. Part of Subhas Bose’s appeal lay in his ideas of dictatorship as being the best form of government for India for the first decade after Independence. In contrast to this, “India” seems to be staider and less emotional in its approach. Why this difference?

The difference between Bengal and India can be linked to homogeneity in one and diversity in the other. Bengal as an idea is homogenous in culture and continuous in territory; this culture can easily be produced through biological reproduction; languages are taught at home. Homogenous nations have poorly developed public spheres, less of formal interactions and exchanges between individuals are familiar, informal, and casual and if such cultures lose the hierarchies of feudalism and fall into the equality of democracy, the process of informalization gets accelerated. Those nations, or those universals like India which has not an iota of homogeneity, on the other hand develop a sort of outwardliness, a public space and hence attitudes and values of being capable of self-control and self-distancing which requires a great deal of formal behaviour. The informalization of the self of Bangladesh, the complete letting go of the attitude happened precisely because the homogeneity of culture gives the nation a certain familiarity whereas the facelessness of India helps provides the right kind of unfamiliarity that requires individuals to hold themselves more dispassionately. Dispassion is the fundamental requirement of rationality, of impersonal and scientific attitudes and indeed of performance and achievements. Too closed cultures are unable to achieve, and fall into the trap of garnering resources to reproduce their cultures in its purest forms. Brahminism was one of this kind, and it is not surprising that Bengal had seen the most fanatic version of this trait. Brahmins practiced high polygamy in form of Kulinism and Sati mostly in the manner of purification of culture. The idea of a Hindu nation came up from Bengal and the germinator of the idea of the Hindu Rashtra, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee being a Bengali and a kulin Brahmin was no coincidence.

Let us all teach ourselves a lesson from the Bangladesh debacle in the ICC quarter final match. Pursuit of homogenized cultures can leave us as under achievers in real life. India presently is enamoured by a homogenous culture; one of a Hindu-Gujju dominated axis, a culture in which the bania pursuit of immediate gain and gratification appears to rule. The advertisors such as Ray Titus is lauding the universalization of India’s youth and the television serials are converting these impulses of the homogenizing of a diverse people into family soaps. The significance of locating a universal culture in a family soap is to give it the right of emotions so as to make it appear as if the universals are procreated from wombs and nurtured among infants through primary socialization. The loss of cultural diversity can be a great loss to people for it takes away from them the sense of a distanced rationality, steeps them into emotions and hence “de-modernizes” them and eventually makes them go out of step with world constituted of formal,
rational and scientific and impersonal forces.

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Amitabh Bachchan – Cricket Commentary

Posted on February 22, 2015 by secondsaturn

I have long stopped following cricket; I find that it was taking up far too much emotional space in my life. I decided to free myself of the affective efforts associated whenever India plays its cricket matches so that I could retain the focus in my mind on affairs at hand. Hence it is nearly after four decades that I sit in front of the television to watch a India-Pakistan match, part of the current Cricket World Cup season. The reason is simple. Amitabh Bachchan is in the commentary box, yet another chip added to his highly diversified portfolio. I follow Amitabh Bachchan for the compulsions of academic research and hence out flies my notebook and ball pen ready to pick up points that might help me to consolidate the idea of his persona.
The commentary is interesting because it helps me look inside Amitbah’s head; the way he looks at the world, the points he picks up, the images he constructs out of the labyrinth of what streams out as images apparently available to all uniformly and universally. It is here that I see how what Amitabh sees in a game of cricket. There are others in the commentary box as well; namely Kapil Dev and a professional commentator. I admit that I have not been following cricket for long now so I have lost touch with the names of commentators and the journalists. Kapil Dev’s commentary is much like that of the professional commentator because both are insiders of the game. They describe what unravels in front of them in terms of the strokes and balls, the fielding and the umpiring. They underscore what is there to be seen, they add background for the viewers of television the careers of the players, records of matches and explain to lay persons of the game why some shots are difficult and what kind of scores are comfortable and which are worrisome. They discuss strategies of games, in terms of the order of batsmen and comment on the quality of the cricket pitch. In short, they are in the game. Let me add that despite my gender and notwithstanding the fact that I never quite watched cricket after Gavaskar and Viswanath, Prasanna and Bedi, Solkar and Engineer, I am quite a connoisseur of cricket.
Amitabh’s comments are on a different plane. He of course reckons the statistics of players and knows through the laws of numbers the right kind of runs a team needs to make in each over of bowling. He also keeps track of historic data of past wins and losses. But he does something more. He analyses each player in terms of his mind, his habits, how he has trained, what his natural tendencies are and what he does with those. He also analyses performances of players in terms of their tendencies to perform under stress, he maintains secret diaries and noting on how people can perform under stress. He knows from the way Rohan Sharma holds his bat and plays his strokes if he has made up his mind to be in the game or is in a haste to score big runs. He guesses absolutely correctly that Shikhar Dhawan despite his discomfort with full toss deliveries the player intends to scrore sixerrs in order to overcome his own weakness and also to communicate his intentions to play the very same lollies which are so uncomfortable to him. Amitabh’s study of players are individuals in their various states of mind, their psychologies, their innate dispositions draws me to the game of cricket more as a field of study of capabilities, of skills and attitudes with which individuals sublimate themselves as parts of a larger whole, namely the team .
Amitabh quickly makes an assessment of the kind of physical fitness which cricket requires; more power and vigour in shoulder and arms for the bowlers and greater flexibility and strength in the hips for the batsmen because they have to stoop for such long hours. He compares the requirements of body tone of a cricketer to that of a film star and concludes that in terms of body fitness, the game demands more than his art and hence cricket is “superior” to cinema. Cricket is also psychologically more challenging than cinema because it holds players in a constant mode of competition with a pressure to win.
The stadium at Adelaide is packed with Indians and Pakistanis; in one corner a group of spectators of the match are holding up the tricolour with the overwriting “Indian Army”; indeed the cricket team is a metaphor for a battalion which has to win a war against the Pakistani attackers and save the nation. The cricket team of Indians is also called as the “India”, reinforcing the idea of the team as belonging to the imagined concept of the nation. I realize that viewing a game like a war pumps all that adrenalin inside my body and eventually turns me off from such supreme emotional investments. But Amitabh rescues the game from such strings and tie ups and raises the match is a plethora of human initiatives, their minds, and their spirits. The match ceases to be a war and graduates instead to an activity in which the human endeavours are extended to their limits. Cricket returns to me as a challenge. It is no longer a war in which a cricket team becomes a substitute for the Indian Army trying to reclaim territories lost to Pakistani infiltrators.
The commentators ask whether Amitabh supports India to which he replies resignedly that he has to because he stays in India; the superstar mentions that he may as well belong to Pakistan because that is where his mother hails from and were it not for the Partition, Pakistan may well have been his home. I am guilt free to appreciate and clap for Misbah, who has been my favourite for quite sometime now.

http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-amitabh-bachchan-s-cricket-commentary-is-on-another-level-2061937

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Rock Music

Posted on January 28, 2015 by secondsaturn

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Snehalata’s Suicide

Posted on December 16, 2014 by secondsaturn

On the 30th January 1914, Snehalata, a yet to be married teenager doused herself in kerosene and set her own body afire. According to the eyewitnesses who tried to rescue her, Snehalata had committed suicide. She pleaded her kin not to save her as she had willingly embraced death. No suicide note was ever found around her and she maintained her stoic silence in the hospital as she lay dying. The only communication that she at all had with the hospital staff was when she asked for gangajal to drink because she was a devout and a spiritual person. The immediate trigger of the suicide seems to be a letter that Snehalata chanced upon in which her father assures one Harendranath Bandopadhyay, father of Dhirendranath, a prospective groom for her, that he will arrange all the money to be paid as dowry by mortgaging his property in North Calcutta. Disgusted and despairing at the impending financial ruin that her father would fall into, Snehalata committed suicide before her marriage. Her suicide inspired many yet to be married girls of Bengal to similarly set themselves on fire and succumb to burns. Snehalata’s suicide alerted Bengal to the menace of dowry in its society. In the contemporary Bengali society of the times, these suicides were related to the issue of dowry. Snehalata’s biographer, Rebatibaran Bandopadhyay, her father’s friend portrayed her as a martyr to the cause of a better society while Prabahini, a Bengali newspaper construed the Snehalata’s suicide as one which was a result of a sense of agency by which a young girl assumed total control of her body and decided to annihilate the same. Prabahini condemned the suicide as having been influenced by the Western sense of individualism, death being the final emancipation. Even in death the forces of patriarchy as represented by the newspaper resented Snehalata’s assumption of control over her body. There were some interpretations of the extreme conservative forces which saw Snehalata as being one who stood against the Westernization of the society, given Rebatibaran’s account of her devout nature.
Tagore put forth his own explanation, namely the bleak domestic life facing a married woman was good enough a reason for her to commit suicide, where death is the only means for emancipation. Later discourses which reviewed and reinterpreted the suicide said that since there was neither a note nor a dying statement and Snehalata, being a loner and withdrawn girl given to obsessive religious fervour, her suicide was dysfunctional and misled. This discourse also insists that dowry may not have been quite the reason for taking her own life for the phase of social reforms were quite over and the country was given to nationalism. All of the above discourses are true but partially so. The truth lies in the combined wisdom of all of the above.
Snehalata’s suicide was not an isolated episode of protest or of existential doom; instead given the fact that it encouraged and inspired many other girls to follow suit and the slew of deaths that followed Snehalata’s suicide raises her act from a case of an individual into a social fact. What forces were gathered in Bengal of the times so as to inspire suicide?
Bengal, during the life and times of Snehalata sufferred from death wish; the boys often took to the bullet, assassinated the British officers and died in the gallows. There was also, due to Swami Vivekananda’s inspiring life, an attraction of men towards celibacy and mendicancy. Death and renunciation combined together to create a life denying proclivity of the spirit. There was also at the same time a growing sense of opportunities both in terms of the emergence of a public space, expansion of the State administration and definitely an increase in the opportunity of professional jobs. The social reforms, which were primal before the Sepoy Mutiny were now complemented by a political activism but was neither dead in Bengal nor in any manner waned. Instead, the social reform spread from Bengal into other parts of India and was integrated into the pan Indian political movement. The overriding flavour of the times was the development of a politics which was mired in and not exclusive of the social reformist agenda. Indeed, the last letters by the revolutionary martyr, Dinesh Gupta shows his overt concern with social ills, especially those found in the Bengali society.
To the best of my mind, the rise of the Ramkrishna Mission, Bharat Sevashram like organizations, the rise of Anushilan Samity and even the RSS and the inspired martyrdom of the Bengali young men have the desire to exercise an individual agency in the larger cause of the society. In the language of Emile Durkheim, this can be characterized as being altruist suicide, where a culmination of a high ground of morality, the desire to articulate an ideology, a desperation to change the system and an excitement of the soul causes an explosive annihilation of the self and the body. Snehalata’s suicide can be placed in the overall death wish of the Bengali society of its times. Indeed, for girls it was suicide because boys had a better chance to die by the gallows. Indeed, a few decades later, there was rise of Bengal women terrorists and the two generals of the Chittagong armoury raid, Kalpana Dasgupta and Pritilata Waddedar show very similar personality trends of being withdrawn and reticent as Snehalata did. Snehalata, thus has a universal dimension to her case.
The decades of the early twentieth century is known as the Bengal Spring, the age of the Sobuj Patro days, a journal literally called as the Green Leaf to signify the onset of spring. Snehalata may have desired to blossom in the spring as an individual, a person in charge of her own destiny and yet while the promises were galore, the real opportunities were rather restricted and her destiny appeared to be immutable from marriage and domesticity made worse by dowry. The rise of popular culture, which the Prabahini insists was a corrupting influence has a rather consistent impact of imbibing in its consumer a sense of individual agency, a sense of destiny, of serendipity and a higher meaning of existence which invariably imbibes a consciousness of being special and marked out for larger purposes of life. For a woman, or a young man, who faces only the bleak reality, the lure of a higher purpose might topple her over the top into self destruction. Despite heaping upon Snehalata the death wish in vogue among the youth in Bengal, one cannot deny the fact that dowry was definitely a growing evil of the Bengali society and that there was also a deep feminist angle to the suicides inspired by her.
Bengal has a rich tradition of feminine protagonist. Women have composed texts, spelt moralities, fought ethical battles. The feminine domain in Bengal has existed since ancient times in contest, competition and often in conflict to the male domain. We have Khana and Mihir fight over what should constitute astrology and whether astrology should be used for the prediction of the weather and crops or should it remain clearly a means to foretell individual fortunes. Khana was Mihir’s daughter in law and her popularity grew to overshadow the fame of her celebrated father in law. The latter is said to have killed Khana by pulling out and severing her tongue and leaving her to bleed to death. The post Vaishnav days saw the rise of Monosha who fought for space with Lord Shiva and consequently the battle of the Gods translated into a battle between Behula, the young bride and the ego of her father in law, Chand Saudagar. Debi Choudhurani, a female dacoit during the Sepoy Mutiny also stood against her greedy father in law, who exiled her because her widowed mother was unable to arrange for a good dowry. Women in the early 19th century were also great renouncers who often took shelter among the wandering minstrels to escape being burnt as a Sati or plain domestic violence. Women often stood as a moral force against patriarchy and many times like Khana, Behula or Debi Choudhurani faced the risk of being assassinated by the men in their own families. Therefore, it should not be very surprising if Snehalata and the others who followed her were actually protesting against dowry.
Historians may contest the above thesis by saying that were she to protest against dowry then where were her letters, pamphlets and so on. This strain of thought show a clear lack of understanding of the feminine spaces and feminine discourses in Bengal. The femininity of Bengal is also low economic class and hence of a lower social standing. Women’s power in Bengal comes from her subalternity.Bengal is overwhelmingly agrarian; rice cultivation is intensive and focussed and useless in larger fields. Much of the village economy also consists of processing simple food products like rice puffs and rice crisps; congealed pulse pastes, papad and above all, gur. There is also a substantial vegetable and fruit cultivation which requires the tending of leaves, shrubs and trees. These become women based occupations while weaving, oil crushing, trade are male activities. Feminine and the masculine are thus often in a Marxian conflict over issues of appropriation of surplus. Women have their own spaces, ow channels of communication, own set of coded friendships like mouriphool, juiphool, secret names by which close associates are referred to and communicated with. Denied of communication through the public sphere, women spread their messages through rituals, fables, folklore; a communication made possible by the peculiar arrangement of their economy. This network today translates into kitties of village women, which manifests today as microfinance. Women’s agency translates as silence into the public sphere precisely because the latter does not have the necessary auditory apparatus to pick up the sound bytes. Snehalata is not silent; she appears to be silent because she does not have the same timbre as the voices in the public sphere. Yet in a tradition inherited from Khana and Benhula, Phullara and Prafulla, she is a very articulate woman, who wishes to claim her dignity in the new age that dawns and when denied of the same by an impending marriage without which the society has not been able to accept the existence of a woman, extinguishes that very life of hers which must be defined in terms of fetters of social customs and hence denied human freedom. Snehalata claims her dignity by denying her body to patriarchy; her suicide speaks a language which even the present day and age is scarcely capable of decipher.

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On Bhai Phnota Day.. Some Random Thoughts

Posted on November 3, 2014 by secondsaturn

When the autumn holidays and the delirious celebrations of the festivals would draw to a close and we would scurry everywhere to collect our school exercise books, pens, maps, atlases and the books and notebooks, bhai phnota would be our only solace of that one more time of gaiety and gathering. The season of festivals start with the Mahalaya and end with bhaiphnota. Grandparents would explain that we start our revelries by tarpan, remembering our ancestors and end it with marking out our brothers as the ancestors of our future generations. Some of my girl cousins would balk at such explanations of only boys being considered as ancestors of the future family and when grandmothers insisted that the women will be remembered by their husband’s families, severe arguments would break out. Aunts intervened invariably to suggest that we enjoy our dalpuris instead of nit picking on meaning of ceremonies and rush us to book advanced shows of latest film releases. Bhai phnota nonetheless remained an important festival, not because each of the nuclear families had brothers but because each nuclear family drew its identity from a larger joint family. Bhai phnota conceals at its core the idea of the Hindu Unidivided Family; if it were only between a brother and a sister, the festival would not have transcended and transformed into a festivity. Families which do not have a larger dynasty to refer to do not and cannot celebrate bhai phnota in a manner of which I knew in my childhood.

I remember the long trains of bedcovers, one following the other to make a large square when brothers in each generation would sit cross legged on the floors with a plate full of savouries, the larger the number of sisters larger the number of items were on the plate . While there could be differences in platter across generations; elders would have made different stuff than what our generation offered, there was no difference among the boys within the same generation. This is because none of us, out of an unwritten code ever discriminated between own siblings, first cousins, second cousins and those who we called as brothers. Servants of the family were not left outside the ambit, even they had their share of the phnota. Neighbours and tenants were converted into “brotherdom”. Bhai phnota’s charm lies not in a family reunion but in the inclusive and exhaustive enumeration of males as being associated with the future of a dynasty. Unlike rakhi, bhai phnota is not about a brother and a sister, but about a ceremony of ancestors, of a recognition of the veins where blood should flow, of major alliances of a family, a network of brotherhood from which one can draw support. Bhaiphnota is an accumulation of social capital.

I have seen bhaiphnota decline and slowly disappear in my family. Mother has lost nearly all her brothers to old age and most of us, in our generation live in other cities and other countries. We have to rationalize our visits back home to coordinate surgeries, illnesses, births and deaths. We have our college and school reunions, we have our various tasks of home renovation, signing of tenancy agreements and many a times club visits with some kind of career pursuits like book launches and seminar presentations. Bhai phnota seems to be the lowest in our list of priority. It seems that this is one festival we would rather like to forget. Even cousins who live in Kolkata treat the festival as only occasions for eating out rather than for the sobriety of the ceremony. Resistance to patriarchy is indeed a possible reason for the loss of popularity of the festival in our kind of families but there is a larger process at work. I think that we have lost our sense of the larger family because we have lost our sense of future.

Bhai phnota is growing in glamour and importance. Servant maids, drivers, and the various other service providers like plumbers, electricians, taxi drivers are closed for business because they are away at the celebrations. It is here that the institution of the family is being discovered anew, perhaps for the first time in the aeons. A section of people who never had known of something like bhai phnota, typically only reserved for the high echelons of the city of Kolkata, tables are turning very steadily and rapidly. It is the proletariat which looks towards organizing and uniting, for they are enjoying a standard of life, levels of consumption as never before. They are the upwardly mobile who are now discovering relatives and kins, finding ties, seeking roots, and in short, slowly, bit by bit building up social capital. While inequalities sit pretty tight, the differences between the elite middle class and the hitherto downtrodden service class, the Shudras of the Bengali bhadralok society are now closing. This closure seems to have sent the upper middle classes into a tizzy of survival when every penny one earns is dedicated towards maintenance of the self into the verisimilitude of one’s inherited class. And assuredly when survival within a class is imperilled, one is struggling to belong to her social class and to keep up with cousins and kins, unsure when at least an equal status will all at once be denied to her, it is difficult to keep up a sense of the family.

Indian sociologists have studied the institution of thefamily generously, noting the changes in the structure of the family from its state of undividedness into nuclearization. They have assigned every class of causes to such a transformation, urbanization, size of family, modernity and individualization, change of occupation from agriculture and business to individual professions. These explanations mark the change in the family from one state to another but do not relate these to the processes within the family, the constant switch between the private and the social investments. When individuals feel the pressure of being downwardly pushed out of her social class, investments are directed at the self and then at the nuclear family. The situation is one of urgency, the immediate concern is to save oneself and one’s nuclear family rather than indulge in the luxury of cultivating the larger civic groups such as the extended family. The danger of loss of social position is then the issue behind the loss of a sense of future and with that of the larger family. Conversely, among those who sense a rise in their relative prosperity and thus acquire a sense of the future move on to the larger social planes of extended families. Bhaiphnota has settled in these quarters after having moved out of our kinds of homes. The rise of the festival among the lower social classes and its imminent dissolution among the upper classes is therefore an indication of the redistribution and reorganization of wealth in the society.

Democracies reflect such changes in politics of anti-incumbency and change, the promise of a Poriborton or the Second Republic of the Hindu Rashtra or any other form of politics which may reflect such a structural upheaval without a visible and apparent or violent revolution.

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Amma – Empress of Tamil Nadu

Posted on October 8, 2014 by secondsaturn

So the deed was done; in the days of the early autumn of 2014, Ms Jayalalitha, the ruling Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu was sentenced to four years of imprisonment on charges of corruption. Ms Jayalalitha, or Amma as she is known across Tamil Nadu is the Empress Dowager of the State inheriting the political legacy and mantle from her mentor and paramour, the charismatic cinema super star turned politician, MGR. Her popularity seems to rise in a straight long curve and she is the only politician in India to have garnered a higher percentage of votes than the front runner, Mamata Banerjee, the incumbent Chief Minister of West Bengal. Amma faces prison for her alleged accumulation of assets far above her declared income. Amma’s arrest especially despite her political influence and popularity is a sure victory for all those fighting against corruption in public life, a platform set out at first by the non starter Aam Admi Party and later appropriated by the ruling BJP. Amma’s arrest is part of the BJP’s attack on the so-called “non BJP states” by its use of the cudgel of corruption. The riots that broke out in Amma’s support shows the unrelenting popular mandate she has in her state. No one seems to mind Amma’s corruption at all; for the people of Tamil Nadu, morals reserved for the Empress are completely different from those for the citizen. Democracy is a means to re-establish an Empire.

In order to understand Tamil Nadu’s unconcern for corruption among politicians one must delve deep into its history. The term Tamil Nadu literally means a confederacy of the Tamil people, signifying that the region has a consciousness of being a linguistic unity of people who are otherwise diverse. Tamil to Tamil Nadu is similar to Sanskrit of Northern India, in which a language attempted to bring together some diverse groups of people under some kind of mutual recognition of being related to one another. The purpose behind the unity in both cases may have been to foster barter and exchange in the hoary ages of primitive economies. The Tamil country has been home to the human species before than anywhere else in India for it was as early as 15,000 years ago that humans grew food and built dwellings here. Tamils are very conscious of the ancientness of their habitat and hence often assert an entitlement to define morality and spirituality for the rest of India. The use of language and later culture and religion as a binding force of its various social groups into an organic solidarity rather than a mechanical solidarity; the former being a unity out of interdependence and exchange and the latter being a unity forged through tribal homogeneity makes Tamil Nadu into a self contained nation. Tamil Nadu is an empire unto itself; it is a nation within a nation. Its strong culture sustains the inner coherence of its society but also isolates it from the rest of the Indians. To attempt to paint Tamil Nadu with the same brush as everywhere else in India would be naïve.
Indian societies have been more or less self regulating and self controlling; sometimes oppressive religious sanctions, at other times surrender of the individual will to a larger collectivity and the compartmentalisation of people into castes have made the Indians peaceful people on the whole. Wars have been fought but those were among kings and the contenders of power while leaving the everyday life of people unaffected. The role of culture therefore assumes a great importance. The huge church like temples in Tamil Nadu points out to the extensive use of religion, religious insignia and religious spaces to hold continuously produce cultures that could bind people together. Political power in the form of the Empire was as also an early appearance in Tamil Nadu with the Pandyans as early as the 3rd century BCE.

Political unity had to be fostered upon the Tamil people of the confederacy in the form of an Emperor with an army because of an armed attack by some raiders from the North. The “north” was the plateau of Bellary in present day Karnataka and the raiders were a group of people known as the Kalabhras. The root, abhra literally means mica but may extend to mean gold and silver dust as well, both of the last mentioned being found in this region. Oral history sources from Jharkhand indigenous tribes, collected and catalogued by Father Dungdung in his museum of oral history at Gumla, near Ranchi informs us of an immigrant group of people who came via the sea with knowledge of metallurgy and who were violent, cannibalistic and aggressive at the same time as the “fair skinned people in white winged horses” who swept down the northern plains over the mountains and looted, raped and burnt down cities and palaces. This means that there was another stream of migration into India along with the Aryans, most probably those who were known as the Asuras. These Asuras may have swooped down into the Tamil country necessitating the first political unity of the region. Emperors are needed to protect the cultural integrity of the Tamils and within the Tamilians, despite the other things of democracy remaining the same, the desire for a super leader is enormous. To try and pull down the Emperor, in this case the imperious Amma, may amount to the dismantling of the Tamil pride and identity.

Tamils have been rather sensitive to conquests from the “north”; its nadir of political humiliation was not so much the British as it was during the period in the 14th century when it was ruled by the Vijaynagara kingdom originating in the same Hampi region as the Kalabhras. It is serendipity that the court ruling sentencing Amma to imprisonment originates in a court in Banglaore, also in the same region of the Kalabhras and the Vijaynagara. Tamils in their minds live through the imperial Cholas, the dynasty that over a few centuries starting from the 9th had extended their empires from the south east Asia, Sri Lanka, Indo-China to be able to construct temples as far as the southern coast of China. They have assassinated the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi because he, a representative of the northern powers had called for peace in Sri Lanka by circumventing the seat of the Tamil power in Tamil Nadu. Amma’s imprisonment may well be looked upon as another molestation of the Tamil honour opening up a long drawn battle of estrangement of Tamilians with the rest of the Indians. Prelude to another Kashmir.

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Hum Log 30 Years Ago and Hence – A Page From History

Posted on September 28, 2014 by secondsaturn

Those were the days of Humlog. ..

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Sova Thama

Posted on August 26, 2014 by secondsaturn

obituary to appear

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Autumn Without Mashi

Posted on July 22, 2014 by secondsaturn

My mother has an older and a younger sister of her own and yet she was the only one who I called Mashi; no proper noun as a prefix which I usually have for my mother’s friends. Just Mashi. Plain and simple Mashi. I have no idea when it was in the haze of my childhood days that Mashi and Ma became friends. I have always seen them as being friends. Ma tells me that she and Mashi became friends when Ma called out to her from her balcony across the lane and asked her to drop by for an evening cup of tea. That was such a simple start of their friendship that bonded a life time. Ma told me once long ago that she had been observing Mashi for a while before that evening when they had tea; Mashi would often stand in her balcony in the golden sunshine of the western sky all by herself crying. Ma had plotted it for some time that she would make the lady her very own friend.
I was in a dream world of fairy tales when I formed a memory of Mashi. She always looked to me as Cinderalla. I don’t know why but it was so. Like Cinderalla she had relatives who were jealous of her, looked down upon her, and insulted her. She was very beautiful and whenever I read if beautiful women like the princesses of Europe or of beauties in the fairy tales I found her face implanted upon these characters. She seemed to me like a fairy tale character. But like all the beautiful and delicate characters she too was battered and badgered at home, left to fend for herself and her children without adequate food and rations. Her saris would be worn out and dull and her feet had deep cracks. It was not that she was poor but she was supposed to be brushed aside and relegated right into a dust bin. This was because she was very very beautiful and her mother died young. A well settled and cultured man who had come to look for a bride in the extended family took fancy to her while she was all in her teens and still wore the frock and insisted that this child would be his wife. Mashi was thus pushed into matrimony when she was still in a daze of her childhood. Her husband, again the only one who I called just Mesho was wary lest her beauty would show him to the world as a character unworthy and undeserving of a woman like Mashi to be his wife.
Mashi was made to live in a vacuum, cloistered and imprisoned like Rapunzel but she talked, chatted and gossiped with whosover she encountered from the little open space she had. Mashi had a strange confidence in her; her interactions were graceful. She never fumbled or floundered when she had to meet people who were in a way strangers to her; her son’s school principle, a living terror was kind and affable with her. My grandfather who did never liked neighbours dropping in for a casual chat welcomed Mashi as his very own kindred. Mashi brought in a lot of joy in our house; as children we loved to talk to her because being a child at heart, we easily reached her.
Mesho lived in a small and cramped flat though his family home was just down the lane. The kitchen was like a cupboard. There were two children and when Mesho became a dog breeder the flat contained three pups not yet potty trained and poos would be dropped and puddles of urine would emerge every now and then. Yet, the flat was spik and span. Walls laden with books gathered no dust, curtains were washed and pressed even if Mashi’s saris were not and despite the fact that her larder had practically no stocks, we always got heartful to bite and chew and drink; Mashi could transform simple muri with raw onions, or rev up the tea with cloves and ginger and sometimes even offer us a spoonful of potato stew. She was a good cook and must have been rather good given the lack of ingredients and above all the lack of exposure. No one really ever called her; battered by her husband the world at large chose to keep her trapped in her cinders. She was indeed Cinderalla. Sometimes when she had to attend a wedding or a party, Ma would descend with her own sarees and jewellery like the fabular Fairy Godmother and dress Mashi up. She changed as magically as Cinderalla.
Mesho was a different man when he was out of his own social circle; he was once posted in Siliguri and here Mashi looked rather happy and comfortable. I suspected that there was some pressure on Mesho by his family to treat Mashi the way he did. Siliguri was a place of anonymity and here Mashi’s life and status improved. But they had to return to Kolkata when Mesho was diagnosed of cancer. He lived long after his surgery and collapsed slowly into a relapse years later. By this time his son was earning and even married, the daughter married and settled well. Both the children were in the USA where the dollar was only rising against the rupee. Mashi was the surviving parent. Soon Mesho’s siblings were dead too and the large family house was left without an occupant. With a generous inflow of the US dollar and a large mansion to herself, Mashi finally emerged as the true Cinderalla.
Mashi’s life was sad for most part of her life but she sailed through her dark days because she lived in a world of her own. This world was made up of ghost stories, Western classics, travel encyclopaedia and above all the Bengali novel. We have a well-stocked library in the locality and Mashi is the only one I know who exhausted its collection. She was simply mad about reading and would gulp down many of the books I issued from my school library hungrily as I would gorge on the rest. Mashi lived in a world of books; she is perhaps the only one I know who knew the history of England backwards. She loved the stories of Knight Templars and the Crusades; she read every kind of historical novel she could lay her hands on. She read Bengali with greater ease than she did English but language was never a barrier. But what she would love most were tales of horror and the unexplained. She hated violence, romance did not interest her and though she regaled in gossip about her neighbours, she had little interest in film magazines. For Mashi, reading had to come with flavour of literature. Once her sister sponsored a trip to Europe for her; the experience of travelling to a land she had savoured through the volumes of Lands and People and Life Travel series from our home collection was a lifelong cherish.
It was in this family home all to herself and deprivations behind her, Mashi revealed her true self. She had excellent taste in home décor, wonderful idea of colours, her taste in artefact was elevated and expensive; these betrayed Mashi’s aristocratic legacy, drubbed in by a fate so long adverse to her. Her garden grew wonderful just as the pictures in a fairy tale. Ma sourced the bel leaves from her garden henceforth. Mashi’s health failed her when she was diagnosed with cancer just as life was opening up to her. My brother who never enters a temple walked all the way up to Thirupathi frantically praying to the Divine that life cannot be snatched away from her just as when good times were coming her way. Mashi survived her illness and slowly one by one she used her years to fulfil her dreams.
Her children looked after her very well. Mashi used her new liberation to give generous gifts and treats; mostly for the servant maids with who she had a love-hate relationship. Sometimes she bought herself expensive things, but these would mainly be food to be cooked and shared mainly among her servants. Ma would despair and but I would see in such gestures a secret side of Mashi. She was playing the role of a Robin Hood now, she was now the Fairy Godmother to those who she felt were the less privileged.
Mashi had to travel to the USA quite a few times and having known the sari all her life, she indulged in buying salwar kameezes for travel. Ma was outraged at her garish taste in apparels but Mashi loved these pieces of clothing precisely because they were old designs which her Muslim friends often wore to school. Her school days were before the Partition where a Muslim elite lived in Kolkata and their girls abound the better schools of the city. It was in moments as these that I got that sudden glimpse into a life that Mashi was born into, a normal, comfortable life that any one of us would take for granted but which Fate made so elusive for her.
We never really had to take time out to visit Mashi nor did she need special slots to visit us. The two homes were continuous. We lived in times when a locality was a social space, people lived in communities and not in circumscribed and enclosed space guarded off by security gates and registers. Our day and time were continuous and one did not need to call the other to drop by. If there was some spare time, I would walk over to Mashi and ask her maid to prepare a foamy and frothy coffee for me. We took one another for granted, just as we did the neem tree which drooled on our northern wall or the gulmohur that sprayed its colours on the black tarmac on the front road. Everything and everyone is a part of the geography of the locality we grew up and have known as our roots. There are no especially mentionable moments with Mashi; there are no memories without her.
It has been a while that Mashi is no more, her progressive fragility rather than age claimed her. There are some who are just part of every day, the blue sky, the first rain, the setting in autumn and the late spring. They are ingrained into the daily phone call, the daily chores, the engrossing concerns and the immediate sharing of thoughts and emotions. It takes a while to realize that they are no more because with such losses, unwittingly you also lose a part of your life that was so inextricably intertwined with theirs.

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